President Carter said yesterday what everyone knows. Any journalist who covered the Democratic presidential primary between Obama and Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania could not possibly have missed the naked hatred of the man based on the fact he is black..Comments such as “Oh I’ll vote for the nigger,” and “he ought to hang from a tree.” These same kind of comments were in the air in western Maryland during a recent town meeting on health care.Western Maryland has a history of being not just right wing territory,but klan territory.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. The unsilent generation knows racism when it sees it. America has not crossed any divide on this subject. The Republicans, especially the Republican South, reborn under Nixon,based on young white men, can be easily ignited on this subject. After all this is a region of the nation where black men are still addressed as “boy.”
The racist attacks on Obama won’t end with health care.They’ll just roll on into other issues on his agenda.the Republican Right is determined to bring him down. And if racism does the job, so be it.

And after all, Jimmy Carter knows what he’s talking about when he spoke.

As the bBC reported it,

Former US President Jimmy Carter says much of the vitriol against President Barack Obama’s health reforms and spending plans is “based on racism”.

Mr Carter told a public meeting there was “an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president”.

As I wrote in Mother Jones last week,

Joe Wilson isn’t just some mean-spirited buffoon. As a South Carolina legislator, he was one of only 7 state senators who fought to keep the confederate battle flag flying over the state capital. South Carolina, of course, was the first state to leave the Union after Lincoln was elected. Flying the confederate battle flag was a big deal in the south, which was once—and in some cases is still—inhabited by the Ku Klux Klan and its successors…

… The decision to fly the Confederate battle flag was made by an all-white legislature in 1962 as the civil rights movement was picking up steam. The bill passed in 2000 didn’t even remove the flag entirely—it called for a different version of flag to be flown in front of the state house instead of on top of it.

The continued presence of a Confederate flag at the state house has caused the controversy to continue. In July 2009, the Atlantic Coast Conference—after discussions with the NAACP—decided to move three future college baseball tournaments out of South Carolina.